Watson, Ian - Novel 06 (23 page)

 
          
So
I
have
come to
Samarkand
and met my new psychic girl. She’s an
Uzbek—tall, raven-haired, dressed in gaudy rags. She herds the fat-tailed sheep
out in those pink stony hills beyond the city. She dubs clothes in the rushing
streams. She even (possibly) saved my life, or limbs, by foreseeing the
earthquake. She kept me in a safe place while the hills rocked, while the
drying tobacco leaves were tossed out from under the grassy eaves of the
houses, and the mud-bricks shook apart, while
Samarkand
itself was beaten like a dusty carpet. Her
father has a woolly beard and a long mahogany head on which a skullcap perches
like a lid. She will be mine, Grigory Arkadievitch’s. I will teach her, and she
will teach me: her skills of the mind, in our laboratory.

 
          
She
watches me now, in her mind, here above the city—here where another earthquake
shook the mosque of Bibi Khanym to pieces centuries ago. A broken dome
survives. In decay, it’s still far bluer than the white paper sky. An arch—a
mighty bare brick rib with some tile-flesh still clinging to it—opens on to the
empty space of a huge room no longer in existence; though it houses one object,
a decorated lectern, the top of which is an open book carved in the marble.

 
          
Is
it really she who watches me? (Wondering how I will change her life by
spiriting her north . ..)

 
          
I
sense ... a woman, anyway. I’m somewhat psychic too.

 
          
Who are you, in my mind?'

           
No answer. Whoever she is, is too
bound up in seeing through my eyes.

 
          
A
flare of panic! I realize of a sudden that I’ve no idea by what precise
sequence of events I got here! I’m just here, as though I’ve been
mesmerised—until suddenly this moment switched on!

 
          
A
movement: and a young man appears from behind the lectern. He’s quite smartly
dressed, and sports exotic sunglasses which are perfect silver mirrors. He
looks foreign: Persian, perhaps. His face is oddly familiar. He cuffs patterns
in the dust with a patent leather shoe, diffident before the eyes of a colonel,
yet sizing me up at the same time. As though he’s been waiting for me! Like a
Moscow
spiv at the railway station.

 
          
I
know him. Yet I don’t know him
here
.
. .

 
          
He’s
come from somewhere else in my life, to haunt me. As though—there’s such an
uncanny sense of
deja-vu
about this
moment!—as though my visit to
Samarkand
has already happened once, without him
being here. Yet here he is now.

 
          
^“
Woman in my mind, is this your
doing? Are you enchanting me?
^”
Ah no, you’re just an onlooker ...

           
Who the hell is he? Challenge him.
“Dobri dyehn, Tovarich!”
He shakes his
head, then answers in English as though he expects me to speak English. As
indeed I do: Russian, Mongolian, English, Turki, Yakut. Polylingual Grigory!
As though ... I’ve spoken a lot to him in English, sometime, somewhere.

           
“We can meet each other here,” he
says conspiratorially. “But where are we really? What does this scene veil from
our eyes? The world of reality veils itself. It always sees only itself, not
beyond itself. Thus God remains unknown.”

 
          
“God’s
certainly been unknown hereabouts for long enough! ” I laugh. “The place has
fallen to pieces.”

 
          
“This
is the Mosque of the Veil, my friend.”

 
          
Are
you my friend? Friend of a Russian colonel, from
Mongolia
? Yet it’s true ... In some strange manner I
am your colonel: the captain of your fate. You’re enlisted under me. Elsewhere
and elsewhen, we’re comrades.

 
          
“Do
you know the story about the origin of the veil that Moslem women wear? The
lady Bibi Khanym, wife of Timur the Lame, built this mosque to delight her
husband who was away at war. Since she was the most ravishing beauty of her
time, naturally the architect fell in love with her. He refused to continue
his work unless she would let him kiss her, just once. Well, she wanted the
work done in time for her husband’s return, so finally he got his way—and so
great was his ardour, that his lips indelibly bruised her fair cheek!” (Oh,
he’s certainly a Persian: ardours, delights, ravishments . . .) “When Timur
came home he discovered the guilty bruise at once and ordained that from then
on all the women in his empire must wear veils so that their beauty wouldn’t
lead men astray.”

 
          
“The
veil is certainly rent, now!” Picking up a sherd of turquoise tile, I toss it
high, turning and twinkling. Ruins.

 
          
“That’s
only a tale, my friend. The meaning of the veil runs much deeper. You see,
woman veils the Absolute for a man’s heart, just as the world veils God. When
she raises her veil for her beloved, then the world also raises its own veil,
revealing what lies behind it.”

 
          
I
don’t know how I got here. He’s right: there
is
a veil— hiding what is really happening.

 
          
“The
Prophet, blessings be upon Him, once said that God hides Himself behind seventy
thousand veils of light and darkness. If God lifted these, then the brightness
of His face would consume whoever gazed on it. If the veil is lifted and the
world nevertheless continues to exist, what is the agent of this miracle? How
long can a world continue to exist thereafter? May one speak of a veil which
has become conscious
of itself
—through
the minds of the creatures that it veils from the divine imagination? Wouldn’t
this be an Iblis, a Satan? The Chinese used to believe that some animal fed
upon dreams . . . The tapir, yes.”

 
          
I
can’t see his eyes. In the little mirrors of his glasses swims a curious . . .
beast, like a scorpion or a crayfish, peering into this scene from somewhere
else through multi-faceted eyes. I’ve seen it somewhere before. Yes, in a
car—in the driver’s mirror! Is this the beast that feeds upon dreams, summoned
up in a thought-picture? Hardly! But what is it? I feel that I should know. As
I shift my head to see it better, it vanishes.

 
          
The
young man grips me by the sleeve of my uniform. He tugs me as though he’s
seeking for a wrestler’s hold. I could snap his spine in seconds!

 
          
“Grigory,
do you know me? I’m Salman. I’m here because I’ve already been here once. You
must have been here too. Here’s a place where our memories intersect.”

 
          
I
let myself be pulled up the steps of the lectern to the open marble book. We
stare down at the blank, wind-polished marble pages.

 
          
Is
this actual
Samarkand
? Or is it only my memory of
Samarkand
, re-animated? This person who calls himself
Salman (whom I know, and who knows me, but not
yet
in time) must have visited here at some stage. An Earth
Resources scientist? Why that? But yes. Something . . . planetary. In what zone
are we? Memory has never been as true as this—such a perfect summoning forth!
It’s as though electrodes are stimulating the interpretive cortex. In him, and
in me. (Are electrodes doing that, right now?) They activate grey matter in the
higher brainstem. But no other conscious-waking experience is present at the
same time. Instead, our two memories are fused, cross-linked— and we relive the
past in a new and different way.

 
          
Planetary.

 
          
“Space
.. ! ” That’s it! I know where we are.

 
          
Pilgrim Crusader.
The insectoids
captured us! Now they’re looking into us. (So is the woman in my mind. Image of
a bird. A dove.)

 
          
All of a sudden, words flow across the mock
pages of the marble book like a liquid crystal display. They are in English.
‘You are in memory-space. This is a zone of inbuilt, barriered stability, which
we interfere with gently. For memory modifies behaviour, guiding the living
system, without itself being modified. Mind is rooted in this stabilising
memory of oneself. Likewise reality is rooted in the remembering of itself,
from moment to moment, of the whole universe.

           
‘Yet
a mind draws on the matrix of all possible events and memories accessible to
it—on the field of archetypes, linking living beings, governing experience.

           
‘In
this way one recognizes oneself in the objective world; one captures the
reflection of oneself.

           
‘Knowledge
requires an object of knowledge—which must still be the subject, externalised.
Knowledge then carries this object back into the underlying subjective field,
out of which its image has been projected—made objective.

           
‘The
universe projects itself, as object, to become subject again through the act of
knowing it. Thus there is a dialectic of subject and object for the mind, and
for reality itself.

           
‘A
rupture of the subject/ object gradient by the pursuit of pure shared
introspection in the archetypal zone must be structurally unstable,
detrimental destabilizing of objective reality. Here is the threat of the Veil
Being. . .’

           
Abruptly the earth trembles,
shouldering white dust into the air. The lectern heaves. The open book locks
into rigid marble. Blank, the pages are blank.

 
          
Dark.
Dark awakening.
Midnight
: starbright, with the Milky Way a torrent
of light arching high above the darkness of the ground. I drink that light in
gladly, but it’s so dim compared with . . . where? There’s a darkness in me
too. Something is hidden from me by more than the night. A black sponge has
been wiped over my mind, stealing away something. Or perhaps simply hiding it I
know not where. I’ve dreamt a blank. More than a blank. There’s a hole, a pit
in me. I might as well have been dead: nothing registering nothing. Yet I can
sense that that nothing is a presence—a thieving presence, a power. Some
overseer exists, some censor ...

 
          
Presently
other bodies stir.

 
          
“Peter?
Are you awake?”

 
          
“Where’ve
you been, Amy? Where were you?”

 
          
“Nowhere.
I was nowhere! I was in Limbo.”

 
          
“We
were in Thlax, all seven of us. In Ideal-Thlax—the great city. There was only
your reflection there the whole time, Amy. Not you—the real you.”

 
          
At
least we’ve got another dream-time ahead of us: second- night, in another eight
or nine hours’ time. “I’ll try to keep our appointment next time round. If I
can! ”

 
          
Thlax at last!
Ideal Thlax: a great
seaport that stretches from the turquoise sea far inland ... I was there; so
were we all. After the long waking midnight spent in talk and love and
twiddling our thumbs (while Samti and Vilo and the rhaniqs slept on and on)
came the greater day of a shared dream; not, thank God, another midnight of the
mind ...

 
          
Awakening
to true morning after our nocturnal adventures in Ideal Thlax, the world feels
curiously bruised rather than refreshed—just as clouds bruise the distant sea
to violet wherever they shadow it. But this isn’t a hangover from the
intoxication of the dream so much as a sense of being expelled for a while from
paradise, the paradise of the internal worlds, the metareality. To bring that
glory home to our benighted world! We will be as angels, then. If I were a
bird, how I would preen my feathers! As it is, I groom my golden down. This
down is like the cells of some vast collective being, whose body is itself not
flesh but these terrains of imagined realities. It still veils the Ultimate,
but by being there we’re part of the act of a God envisaging a universe .. .

 
          
Samti
and Vilo, assisted by Ritchie, tie nosebags of crushed beans to the rhaniqs’
muzzles. Pasture is poor here below the knuckles of the rise. So the huge gawky
beasts snuffle and munch their breakfast with a rhythmic sideways flexing of
the jaws, while for us: pickled vegetables and balls of sweet dough, washed
down with
lariz.
Presently Samti and
Vilo groom the rhaniqs with curry-combs.

 
          
As
the sun slowly rises in the sky, we saddle up and ride.

 
          
On
down to Thlax, that little seaport built of rose-red stone; its breakwater
shelters two large sea-going junks and a score of smaller fishing vessels, nets
still drying off in the morning sun from yesterday.

           
Down to a caravanserai, where we
hand over our rhaniqs for the use of other travellers or farmers, or perhaps to
haul small boats ashore. Where we sleep our
midday
siesta while Samti and Vilo are away
arranging shipping across the last stretch of ocean to the shores of the
world-continent. Where we re-enter Ideal Thlax, only one celestial city among
many, peopled with the dead...

 
          
Golden,
we sail the sea eastwards, Thlax left far behind.

           
Mats of blue weed, afloat upon the
open ocean, tangle down into the depths providing nests for scuttling
arthropods, perches for yellow-plumed seabirds, fish mazes. Our sailors winch
up these rafts entire—convenient, natural trawl nets they are. They pluck out
arthropods, tangled fish, Crustacea and weed pods, some to preserve, some for
our supper, and toss back the weed behind us.

 
          
The
skipper of the junk is named Radanty. He is bonded. He has been to the boundary
of Menka and become a hero. His ship bears a cargo of island spices and resins,
and the deep-sea harvest that he hauls up
en
route
, and also some golden fibres of the dead.

 
          
When
the setting sun spills gold across the waves, gilding our pelts, Radanty
invites us to share his dream (at least until our own alien sleep rhythms
snatch us away at
midnight
to
a false dark day). His bride is dead, and her
tulku
is reincarnated ip his flesh. Her death name is menSiri. She
bore two children before the parents travelled to die. (One owes a duty to the
world, just as he owes a duty to his ship, delighting in its creaking, rolling
existence.) Radanty and his wife are in a more perfect state of marriage now
than when she wore her own flesh and bore her life name. And their offspring,
too, far from being deserted, join her and Radanty in common nightly dreams
from their island home far away.

 
          
To
his dream he invites us after our supper of sea dainties; to climb the sleep
tree with him. What closer intimacy than to sleep with a dead beloved,
exploring the shared dreams they generate together? We can do it now. He can
see it by our skins, while
she
can
read it in our askas. Samti and Vilo are particularly delighted by the
invitation; here is a perfect pattern of the intimacy that they themselves
seek.

 
          
So
82 Eridani sinks slowly into the ocean, flashing green through the bend of air
when it slips down below the sea horizon. Wind has slackened. Our junk bobs
gently forward into the dusk, no land between us and the
port
of
Pyx
on the world continent apart from a few
tiny insignificant islands off to the south-east.

 
          
The
two night crew rouse themselves, set lanterns at prow and stern and high up the
mast. We go below to sleep, more than perchance to dream . ..

 
          
Here
is an underwater world. We swim through a submarine city of orange coral.
Schools of tiny vivid fish, each all of a single hue, hang up coloured
map-sheets on the water gradients as though bent on running through all
permutations of the four- colour theorem; while other large fish, deeper down,
creak and groan, chatter and hiss, lock phosphorescent horns and joust with one
another. We breathe water. We fight devilfish with spears. We couple with giant
gentle sea beasts, laved with liquid ambergris that scents the water muskily.

 
          
menSiri
puts on flesh for Radanty. She lives again, dancing a marine ballet...